Historic Urban Landscape in Beijing

The Gulou Project and Its Contested Memories¹ Florence Graezer Bideau and Haiming Yan

Maags, Christina & Marina Svensson (eds), Chinese Heritage in the Making:

Experiences, Negotiations and Contestations. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018

doi 10.5117/9789462983694/ch04 Abstract

The chapter scrutinizes public reactions to two successive projects (2010 and 2012) that seek to transform the urban fabric of Gulou, a neighbour-hood in Beijing. By discussing collective memory (through lived and embodied experience of heritage and the community’s attachments to the place), it provides insights into the complex and evolving relationship between official, professional and local narratives and the memories of its inhabitants. The study analyses the role and power of different actors involved in the urban redevelopment and heritage management of the neighbourhood. Its conclusion sheds light on local heritage categories and on the asymmetry between relocation and preservation issues.

Keywords: heritage, collective memory, recommendation of historic urban landscape, Gulou neighbourhood, urban transformation, preserva-tion, resistances

1 This chapter is based on a multidisciplinary and international project entitled ‘Mapping Controversial Memories in the Historic Urban Landscape: A Multidisciplinary Study of Beijing, Mexico City and Rome’, funded by the Swiss Network for International Studies (SNIS) for two years (2015-2017) and is coordinated by Florence Graezer Bideau (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne – EPFL) in collaboration with Yves Pedrazzini (EPFL) and Rafael Matos Wasem and Jean-Christophe Loubier (University of Applied Sciences of Western Switzerland HES-SO). Principal members are Haiming Yan in Beijing (Chinese Academy of Cultural Heritage), Lesslie Herrera (EPFL), Martha de Alba in Mexico City (Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana – Iztapalapa), Lucia Bordone (EPFL), and Viola Mordenti (ETIcity) in Rome.

Beijing’s urban fabric and its current transformation

In February 1950, four months after Mao Zedong announced the estab-lishment of the People’s Republic of China, two architectural approaches were competing for the transformation of the capital city of New China.

Architectural idealism aimed to preserve the old city intact within its walls while political pragmatism, based on a Soviet model, aimed to transform the old city by implementing industrial and administrative zones (Sit 1995).

Tradition gave way to modernity. Less than 50 years later, the new master plan for the development of Beijing (1991-2010) reversed the trend with a strong emphasis on the aesthetics, or visual atmosphere (fengmao), of the city, taking account of its ancient and traditional character (Abramson 2001, 2007; Gaubatz 1995). Changing the scope of preservation from individual buildings to an entire district had a real impact on urban heritage. The fragmented politics of urban planning and property speculation during the Reform Era had severely affected China’s built environment (Hsing 2012;

Leaf 1995; Wu 1997).² The traditional areas in Beijing composed of hutongs (alleys) and siheyuan (courtyard houses) are highly valued as historic, economic, and cultural areas, but these became the subjects of controversy during developments that potentially jeopardize cultural heritage (Felli 2005).

The disappearance of half of the 7000 hutongs in less than 50 years (or 24 per cent of the old city) has raised awareness of the protection of cultural heritage at both local and national levels. In the year 2000, to meet this challenge the Municipality of Beijing designated 25 historic preservation districts. These consisted of traditional neighbourhoods considered to be a microcosm of the broader city unit plan with its historic structural elements (walls, doors, lanes, hutongs, official buildings, temples) and immaterial culture (mixed population, ways of living, social and cultural practices). The Shichahai area is typical of such a historic and cultural neighbourhood. It has over ‘40 historic monuments (including temples and royal mansions), the largest natural lake in the city, and a large historic residential area with relatively well-maintained courtyard houses’ (Zhang 2008: 200).³ For generations many have viewed the area’s rich legacy of historic buildings

2 The rehabilitation of Ju’er hutong (Wu 1999) – a governmental project of the rehabilitation of dilapidated housing in the inner city – which attempted to improve the housing conditions of its inhabitants when the market mechanism was introduced in Beijing, gives us an interesting insight into the management of urban development in the 1990s (Yang and Fang 2003).

3 In 1992 Shichahai was labelled ‘Historical and Cultural Scenic District’ by the municipal government of Beijing.

as an organic living tradition. It includes the Bell and Drum Towers, and the chessboard grid of traditional courtyards ‘with public life spilling into the hutong alleyways and private life hidden behind brick walls in the courtyard houses’ (Ouroussoff 2008). The native families of Beijing have gradually been replaced by migrants from other provinces, both old and new, as well as workers, small entrepreneurs (shop owners, restaurant or café managers), craftsmen, students, and expatriates. Shichahai is typical of an area where tangible and intangible heritage meet and where local inhabitants and communities make a living from their neighbourhood and contribute to its urban development. Their claim for the recognition of their right to belong to their place of residence and to not be displaced has become a crucial issue (Broudehoux 2004; Merle 2014; Siu 2007; Zhang 2013).

Fifty years on, the preservation of the old city is once again at stake. Will the government’s plans, initiatives, and projects finally better integrate the historic monuments with their surroundings, their social and cultural environment? More plans and initiatives have been implemented to protect the urban fabric, yet they seem only to worsen it. How can we understand the paradox? What is missing in the initiatives? How can we understand the efforts of different groups, such as the government agencies, expert-driven projects, and local voices? Concepts such as historic urban landscapes (HUL) and collective memory are useful analytical tools to address these questions.

HUL and collective memory

Over the past decade, heritage management has become key to sustainable urban development. At the international level, reflection on the renewal of urban conservation approaches culminated in the 2011 UNESCO ‘Recom-mendation on Historic Urban Landscape’ (RHUL). UNESCO defines HUL as

‘the urban area understood as the result of a historic layering of cultural and natural values and attributes, extending beyond the notion of “historic cen-tre” or “ensemble” to include the broader urban context and its geographical setting’ (UNESCO 2011: Article 8). To define the scope of its definition more closely, the following is added: ‘This wider context includes notably the site’s topography, geomorphology, hydrology and natural features, its built environment, both historic and contemporary, its infrastructures above and below ground, its open spaces and gardens, its land use patterns and spatial organization, perceptions and visual relationships, as well as all other elements of the urban structure. It also includes social and cultural practices and values, economic processes and the intangible dimensions

of heritage as related to diversity and identity’ (UNESCO 2011: Article 9).

The innovative perspective of RHUL lies in its ‘holistic approach’, which seeks to transcend the opposition of conservation and development, nature and culture, tangible and intangible, and the protection of antiquity and creation of the new (cf. UNESCO 1972, 2003).

This concept seems to be all-encompassing, one that addresses all tan-gible and intantan-gible elements. Yet it remains pure rhetoric, without any concrete guidelines as to how the ‘social and cultural practices and values’

should be preserved. There is legitimate criticism of the weak impact of UNESCO recommendations on national laws and practices, largely because it is subject to local political, economic, environmental, cultural, and social issues, as well as legal and administrative constraints.

This is especially true of cities such as Beijing (as well as cities such as Datong and Tianjin discussed in this volume). In historical areas, where responsibility for protecting heritage lies with the municipal level, but without financial resources, one collateral effect of protection is the profit generated through commodification within the selected zone. In Beijing and elsewhere, conservation practices that were supposedly designed to preserve cultural diversity and enhance links between the tangible context and inhabitants have often been criticized for increasing social and spatial fragmentation (Abramson 2001; Bandarin and Van Oers 2012; Shin 2010).

For local communities involved in such processes, this criticism presents an opportunity to claim their rights to the city (Harvey 2008) and/or the heritage in their neighbourhood (Evans 2014) or villages (Svensson 2006).

Beijing’s initiative for historic districts predates the RHUL. Why is it so difficult to practise this approach? All of the recommendations appear consistent with the city’s initiative, with one exception: ‘the intangible dimensions of heritage as related to diversity and identity’. This highlights the main limitation of the RHUL: it is too broad and addresses too much to be holistically implemented. Thus any partial understanding and adoption of the recommendations can lead to biased practice with regard to the preservation of the historical urban landscape.

One crucial dimension of heritage as related to diversity and identity is collective memory, first explored by Maurice Halbwachs (1950). He asserted a dynamic role for collective memory in the process of the identification of a social group and its mechanism of spatialization in the group’s territory and architecture. Urban studies and the history of nationalism have revisited Halbwachs’s ideas on collective memories, insisting that his dynamic processes refer to the past to better describe the present. How people con-struct a sense of the past is a major issue within social and cultural history

(Huyssen 2003), shedding light on urban memory that reflects various strata in society and the local communities that construct the city landscape.

Social representations of collective memories produced both by inhabit-ants and the local agencies involved in urban planning management and preservation are diverse, contested, and conflicting. Local resistance to rapid transformation can be tracked either through its narratives or practices (Scott 1990). It is mostly expressed in or defined by ordinary, everyday practices (De Certeau 1990) applied in spaces of various dimensions, from physical to emotional, political to economic, or social to cultural. They involve a diverse population of different social classes, genders, ages, and ethnicities, and are defined according to their feelings of belonging to the area.

An alternative microhistory of these urban territories or ethnographies of heritage and territorial place-making (Bendix et al. 2012; Feuchtwang 2004; Graezer Bideau and Kilani 2012; Wang 2012; Yan 2015) strengthens a wide range of discourses, privileging some social actors while simultane-ously disengaging others from the use of heritage. Over the past decade many scholars have highlighted the production of internal hierarchies as constitutive of the process of heritagization (Di Giovine 2009; Herzfeld 2004; Smith 2006) where different collective memories cause rivalry and controversy (Connerton 2009). In the case of Gulou, highlighting local group strategies for preserving links and practices of memory will reveal both the gap and tensions between local inhabitants’ needs – mainly popular classes, illegal migrants, and elderly natives – in their everyday lives and the new, government-defined, functions of the area (a tourist and commercial zone). It will also show the potential and limits of heritage activism in an urban landscape.

The area and the project

The Bell and Drum Towers (Zhonglou and Gulou) are located at the north end of the central axis of Beijing’s old city. Built in 1420, the two towers are 2.1 kilometres away from the north gate of the Forbidden City, serving as both a physical and cultural marker for the capital. Physically, they showed the north border of the gated city. Culturally, they were time-keeping buildings:

They announced the time day by day and centrally shaped and maintained Beijing residents’ rhythm of life.⁴ Because of their spatial and temporal

4 A classical Chinese saying refers to the functions of the two towers – morning bell, evening drum.

characteristics, the two towers gradually became a central hub and public space within the city. By the mid-sixteenth century, the Drum Tower and its vicinity had evolved into a commercial centre as well. This commercial prosperity was still evident in 2012, when small shops, restaurants for local foods, coffee shops, and bars were around the square, with a big local market at the northeast of the Bell Tower. This area, then, is a multilayered repre-sentation of the city’s cultural memory over time: spatial icon, temporal marker, and social and commercial livelihoods. In 2002, it was designated as one of Beijing’s historical and cultural protection zones.⁵

In 2010 a development project was proposed for this protection zone.

In January, during the annual Two Meetings,⁶ official media released the message about the ‘Beijing Time Cultural City’ development project, the intent of which was to spend RMB 5 billion (about US$61 million) to renovate an area consisting of 12.5 hectares centred on the Drum and Bell Towers.

According to the reports, the project would enlarge the square between the two towers by widening the streets, in order to improve the residents’

quality of life. A seemingly more compelling purpose was to create within the area a historic-centred place of time-telling celebration. A conference centre, an underground complex with a museum, and shops and car parks were planned, and the government even proposed to resume the ‘morning bell, evening drum’ tradition (Jiang, 2010).

The ambitious project was soon widely criticized. The voice of opposition came from the Beijing Cultural Heritage Protection Center (CHP), an NGO engaged in historic preservation.⁷ According to CHP, the project would result in massive relocations and the demolition of cultural properties. CHP saw the new underground museum as a useless investment, saying: ‘[s]imply improving the quality of the museum exhibitions inside the Drum and Bell Towers can encourage a deeper level of appreciation and understanding’

(CHP 2010). CHP even planned to organize a public meeting for debates, which was cancelled by the police at the last minute.

5 In 2002, the Beijing Municipal Institute of City Planning and Design (BICP) proposed to launch surveys to identify the existing siheyuan of the old city. Standards for recognition of the protected courtyards with licensed cards were the following: ‘The present condition is well, the layout is basically sound, the building style is still existing, it forms a scale, it has reserved value.’ See http://www.bjghy.com.cn.

6 In March each year, China holds its National People’s Congress and Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference. Commonly called Lianghui (Two Meetings), it constitutes the perfect moment for announcements of new proposals and projects.

7 CHP has its official website at http://en.bjchp.org/.

Towards the middle of 2010, the ‘Beijing Time Cultural City’ project went quiet. It is not clear how much influence CHP and other preservationists had over this suspension, but the reason given was administrative transition.

In July, the municipal government of Beijing merged Dongcheng – where the Gulou area is located – and Chongwen Districts into a new Dongcheng District. Grand projects proposed by the previous government, like the Gulou project, were halted and to be reconsidered by the new government (Yang 2010).

The idea of ‘restoration’ for Gulou never disappeared, however. In 2012, the government restarted the proposal with a less ambitious plan entitled

‘Bell and Drum Tower Square Restoration Project’. The new project would restore the original historical square based on a map drawn in the Qianlong reign of the Qing dynasty (1735-1796). Courtyards and structures deemed inconsistent with the map were to be demolished to restore the traditional landscape. As a result, the plan called for the expropriation of 66 courtyard dwellings and 136 households (Wei and Guo 2012) which were considered

‘without historical value’, a total of 4700 square metres. The compensation rate was RMB 44,000 per square (US$5400 in 2012), plus an affordable apart-ment in Shaoyaogju neighbourhood.⁸ The deadline to claim the apartment was 24 February 2013. If the agreement was signed by 2 February, each household could receive an extra ‘award’ of up to RMB 170,000 (US$20,700), an obvious incentive for quick relocation. Although the compensation rate seems high, it was in fact about only half the market price in the area as it is located in the very centre of the historic district. Given this, the residents felt it to be unfair as they speculated on the rate their counterparts in nearby neighbourhoods could receive.

This new restoration project encountered even wider and stronger resist-ance than the previous one. This was partly because it was an action plan rather than a concept, and partly because of the extremely short period between announcement and implementation – only two and half months, which included the Chinese New Year. Active preservationists quickly re-sponded – as CHP had to the previous project⁹ – but local outrage was more striking this time around with many residents refusing to move. As Simon Rabinovitch recorded, only a handful had left with the deadline closing in: ‘Police officers have been knocking on doors on a daily basis to remind

8 Shaoyaoju is located between the third and fourth ring avenues, to the northeast of the Gulou area. It is still seen as part of the city unlike many relocation places outside the fifth avenue seen as suburban areas.

9 CHP has not intervened in the second restoration project.

people their time is up. Angry residents have had shouting and shoving matches with them. Many say they will fight to stay’ (Rabinovitch 2013).

In spite of all the controversies during the case, the project has progressed since 2013. Almost all courtyards designated by the plan have been evicted and residents have been relocated. The square has been ‘cleaned’. There is a new wall built along the eviction line. In the past, the square was used as a parking space. Now it is a public square for people to enjoy recreational activities. A notice board was erected named ‘Bell and Drum Towers Square Management Rules’, listing several forbidden behavioural codes such as gambling and superstitious activities, fighting, lying on the ground, playing soccer, walking dogs, etc. And most inhabitants said: ‘It is now better than before.’ As one said, ‘There used to be so many shops and a commercial atmosphere. Now it’s all back to normal life.’

The Gulou area has become a battlefield in which three major groups of stakeholders fight over sharply different claims. The government discourse primarily revolves around key, but blurring, terms such as restoration, authenticity, environment improvement, cultural and art zones, etc.

Preservationists, on the other hand, question each government statement

Figure 4.1 Demolition of dilapidated houses in front of the Drum Tower

photograph by Florence graezer Bideau and Haiming yan

with a counter-statement. The most complex group is the local inhabitants, inside and outside of the eviction area. The concept of ‘cultural heritage’, or ‘historic urban landscape’, seems to be too far removed from their dis-courses. Instead, their claims and voices are concerned with practical issues, living conditions, traffic, environment, etc. Revealingly, the struggle has become the mechanism by which collective memories are created, shaped, and reproduced. How should we understand the three groups’ discourses?

And how do the narrative claims of local inhabitants reflect the social fabrics of historic urban landscape in China? To address these questions, we have conducted field research in the Gulou area and collected data from official discourses by reading policy documents and media reports closely. Preservationists’ claims are analysed using interviews and NGOs’

and voluntary groups’ website posts. To fully investigate locals’ opinions and practices of the project, we conducted ethnographic observations and interviews between late 2015 and early 2016. More than 30 local residents were interviewed with questions about their attitudes towards the project and living conditions. Memory was a central topic in the interview

and voluntary groups’ website posts. To fully investigate locals’ opinions and practices of the project, we conducted ethnographic observations and interviews between late 2015 and early 2016. More than 30 local residents were interviewed with questions about their attitudes towards the project and living conditions. Memory was a central topic in the interview